Grieve Weave  1 -  22

This series of artist’s books integrates ghost prints into a unified artist’s book structure where woven images hover in an abstract, hard-to-decipher place. The works can be tilted, flipped, opened, re-hung, or re-positioned in multiple directions, and no focal point or "correct" orientation exists in the work itself. 

What happens when an image or a book is seductive but difficult to read? Abstraction in the book form defies easy reading; as queer art historian David Getsy writes, “queer abstraction” can act as a form of camouflage, non-disclosure, or method for jamming the surveillance of queer bodies. Navigating queer and transness over two decades of political change, I’m ever more convinced it cannot be entirely understood or legitimized through representation and public visibility. Grieve Weave accesses what is felt or sensed but not entirely visible. 

A weaving cannot be read as a traditional book, and yet it has deep historical connections to text and today's information technologies. Weaving is a form of ancestral knowledge and a companion in the contemplation of grief. The series is not explicitly about identity, but instead about creating book objects that hover alongside it.

Selected images
Grieve Weave 9 (overlapping grief weave) / Bauhaus wallpaper Ouija tea set, 2023, Artists' book: monoprint on coventry rag and somerset, asahi silk and iris rayon bookcloth.

Grieve Weave 13 (radiating kindness weave) / Bauhaus wallpaper Ouija clutch, 2023, Artists' book: monoprint on woven Somerset paper, Asahi mohair and Iris rayon bookcloth.

Grieve Weave 15 (Clarice Lispector weave) / Bauhaus wallpaper Ouija passport holder, 2024, Artists' book: monoprint and etching on somerset and pescia, letterpress on mohawk superfine, asahi silk bookcloth.

Father / Mother

This series of drawings follows my interest in surrealist techniques and processes that mediate direct representation. The images are drawings and gravestone rubbings, each completed in 1 separate sitting, beginning in daylight, observing the setting of the sun, then working to twilight, and finally into the night when the drawing must be finished without the aid of light. The finished drawings are left overnight in darkness and collected in the morning. 

The first pairing FATHER / MOTHER was produced after my father died in 2019. The second pairing MOTHER / FATHER was produced after my mother died in 2021. The third pairing was made in 2022, and the fourth in 2025. 

 

Selected images
FATHER / MOTHER, 2019-2025, graphite on kozo, (detail), each drawing 22 x 30 inches. Series of durational drawings produced over 6 years. 

Mirror Drawing book

Singularity is always already plural; individuals are at once unique in their differences and relational to others. Anthea Black and Thea Yabut create drawings, book works, prints, photographs, and composite films simultaneously together and individually, each mimicking the other’s movements and marks on the surface or page. This repetitive relationality has an allegory in pattern, which is a succession of singularities brought together and recapitulated in all directions. The uneven quality and weight of the lines registered in their Mirror Drawings allows difference and uncertainty to slip into repetition. The gesture of each artist is the same but the effect is not. Every movement contains its own possibility. Repetition and mirroring are processes that don’t disappear into the image; rather Black and Yabut’s images make these processes visible, registering the hands—the materiality—of the artists together and differently.

-Jen Kennedy, excerpt from Mirror Drawing curatorial text

Selected images
Mirror Drawing book, Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, graphite on paper, 2015.

Exhibition
MIRROR DRAWING, Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, La Centrale / Gallérie Powerhouse, Montréal, Quebec, March 17 to April 14, 2017.

Two fold is a wall-mounted accordion book that consists of 84 cut-paper panels. A collaboration between Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, Two fold begins with their ongoing "mirror drawing" studio game, and their practice of using scissors and knives as a drawing tool. Working from the centre and cutting outwards, the pair creates a third inner space that exists at the meeting point between two pages, echoing Homi Bhabha's idea of the third space as an iterative, continuously expanding code.

The accordion book binding method and installation, devised by Anthea Black, allows each page to hover seamlessly on the gallery wall.

Images
Two Fold: twice as great or as numerous, Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, Binding by Anthea Black, Cut Somerset book paper, 2016-2017.

Exhibition
MIRROR DRAWING, Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, La Centrale / Gallérie Powerhouse, Montréal, Quebec, March 17 to April 14, 2017.